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If Everyone Learns to Code, the Value of Knowing How to Code Will Be Destroyed

13 points by bmj 4y ago

public_defender 4y ago
This is what happened to lawyers when everyone learned how to read. Then commenced a long evolution of the profession where practitioners did their best to make the law more obscure and to invent as many dirty tricks as possible in order to pull the ladder up and sustain law as a profession through other means of exclusivity than the old education moat.
- toss1 4y ago
  What a load of absolute nonsense. I have personally coded a system for legal billing, had a variety of direct dealings with the legal system (contracts, etc.), and I live in a household with an attny at a top firm. I've been surprised by a good number of counter-intuitive things in the law, such that the general rule I've heard repeatedly is that we cannot reason about the law without actually looking at the code in that particular instance — go look it up. This strongly resembles software code - we can assume a bunch of things about how something works, but to really find out, we must read the source code or trace it — go look it up. Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. Every single unexpected or counterintuitive thing I've found, once I dig into it, is actually makes sense in terms of history, e.g., this seemingly odd rule of civil procedure is in place to prevent [bad_stuff] from happening which happened before, and from nearly 250 years of law in the US and 450 in some states, some serious cruft has accumulated, and could use some updating. This is NOT to say that some laws aren't unreasonable, and to that we need to look to politics, not some "trickery to maintain legal pay". I should also point out that the legal profession has not artificially limited the supply of lawyers as the medical profession has done by limiting accreditation of professionals. The result is that there are huge numbers of law school graduates, who even pass the bar exam, who literally cannot make a living as lawyers, and being offered $20/hour (literally) to work in some suburban law office with the hiring attny acting like it's a great offer. And watching from up close and inside it, the idea that 'just because you can read means that you should be able to practice law', is utter nonsense. This has NOTHING to do with any kind of alleged "dirty tricks", and EVERYTHING to do with the inherent complexity that arises from the situation. Just because you can write a "Hello World" app in your favorite language does not mean that you can design and build an ACID-compliant accounting system & database, or even know that concurrency issues exist and what to do about them. So, the actual facts on the ground are that attnys have not done the kind of exclusivity and dirty tricks that you cite, and in any case, they haven't managed to keep the wages in their profession high. So just because you have an attitude, does not mean that it is justified. Stop spouting nonsense.
  - public_defender 4y ago
    Ugh. It's so discouraging when my lived experience contradicts with the subjective observation of someone who knows a lawyer and therefore becomes nonsense. I do want to point out that the "dirty tricks" methodology is in full effect, but has been wholly ineffective at e.g. keeping lawyer salaries and employability high. Just because it failed to deliver on those axes doesn't mean it's not happening. > Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. I'm not really motivated by this interaction to provide examples, but I assure you they are myriad. What I find particularly interesting about this comment is the assertion that the law makes sense if you just read it. This is both technically correct and practically useless. It illustrates that the intellectual moat which sustained law as a historically elite trade has evaporated. > Just because you can write a "Hello World" app... I hope that the difference between hello world and the other thing is that the developer has skill which adds value to the product. That's frequently not the case with lawyers. A lot of the time the increase in skill doesn't correlate to added value for anyone but the lawyer. It's a profession where people are largely rewarded for selfishly sequestering value rather than creating a better product/service or efficiently collaborating. tldr; I hope that the code boot camps AND the law schools go out of business, but that your field can avoid the needless arcane complexity to which mine has long ago capitulated.
    - toss1 4y ago
      OK, you've been much more deeply in it than I have. I used to have a similar attitude — that I ought to be able to quickly read a law in plain language and know what to do. Yet every time I argued that, I lost to valid often historical explanations from the attnys I was working/living with (& I've lived w/one for decades & been involve in a complex case with lots of BS maneuvering for 7+ years, and worked w/many building software for them). No one doubts that there is a LOT of needless arcane complexity. It is obvious to me that law is a monstrous mountain of arcane cruft. And not only the law, but also the caselaw precedents, regulations, etc.. It's also clear that this 1) has a strong exclusionary effect and 2) that those in the profession have little motivation to reduce this exclusionary effect, and some motivation to retain it, and so don't. But there is a difference between a system that has a tendency towards a result that no one fixes, and a conspiracy to create similar results. So, I'd really like to hear a good example or two that was deliberately created to exclude. Because AFAICT, it's just a mess that nobody is doing anything about and acting like it is some particular person's fault is self-destructive.
andsoitis 4y ago
It’s difficult to tell who the author is addressing and what they want to have happen. Are they talking to aspiring programmers and saying: stay away! Are they talking to government officials and saying: change policy (to what I’m not sure and the author doesn’t describe, yet mentions policy several times). Are they talking to universities/colleges: hey, stop adding courses in programming and advertising them? Etc.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  I personally interpret it as "stop telling people struggling to learn to code." At least thats how it read to me.
booleandilemma 4y ago
Yes, and FAANG will be able to hire developers the way McDonalds hires fry cooks. That's the end game, but I think we all know this already. Don't devalue yourself.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Is there something wrong with that? That's how supply and demand works. Also, FAANG aren't the only companies in the world, just like McDonalds isn't the only restaurant.
oifjsidjf 4y ago
It's already hard to get good developers. The only thing this will do will be that searching for good developers will be even harder. The shittiest lawyers work for the government. I have a feeling the same will happen with the shittiest programmers: they will work for the government so now all of the most important government/privacy/identity infrastructure will be done by the least capable programmers.
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  I work for government. Hahaha I guess I’m done here for the day.
  - cloudymeatballs 4y ago
more_corn 4y ago
Bullshit. There’s infinite useful work to be done. Everything broken, inefficient, unjust is work to be done. Every business idea anyone fails to launch, every improvement anyone fails to implement is money left on the table. I just helped a client launch a tool that captures her decades of specialized knowledge and skill. Now her new hires can do work as well as she does. I charged a lot, but it was worth it because I created even more value. The key here is that even if she could have done it she’d still be creating that value. The reason the computer industry has persisted is that computers are tools for multiplication of effort. Did you ever wonder when businesses would catch on and stop spending so much money on computers? They never did. Because computers create more value than they cost. Excel allows regular people to do difficult businesses projections because it’s a powerful tool. That’s why businesses keep spending money on it. If everyone learns to code we get more work done. Every beneficial software tool gets built. (Ever been at work and thought, man this would be so much faster if “random specialized software tool” existed?) Computers are just tools. Tools help us do work faster, better, with less error. Everyone learning to use powerful tools makes everyone more powerful, multiplies the value of their efforts. But also, not everyone wants to or has the temperament to code. Civilization is specialization.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Bjarne Stroustrup saw this danger years ago, and invented C++ to combat it. The ISO C++ Committee has bravely carried on his vision. https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm > Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers?
- danjoredd 4y ago
  Unironically trying to learn C++ for that reason. Jobs that require that pay REALLY well compared to like Javascript and Python, at least with what I have seen. Noone wants to use it, but businesses need people that know it, so I want to fulfill that need as best as I can
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  In case you haven't realized it, that interview was a spoof. It never happened.
dougmwne 4y ago
To some level, coding talent could be like Jevons Paradox. The price could go down, but the total spend on coding talent could go way up. I see the point about coding being highly scalable, and of course it makes sense that a limited and expensive talent resource has been used on highly scalable business applications. But if coders were much cheaper, it could make sense to apply code to many more, less scalable business problems. While not great for an individual highly paid coder, could be great for productivity growth. Unlike churning out more lawyers, more coders can create a lot of economic value as they increase the overall amount of business automation. I think the policy wonks are less clueless than this author seems to assume.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
toss1 4y ago
Nice argument, and good examples from other professions. The problem is that even if the market is "flooded" with freshly-credentialed grads who can supposedly code, that does not mean that they really can. Knowing the basics of a language is only one step, and not even the most crucial one. Much more critical is the ability to reason about complex systems, abstract the critical elements, and synthesize useful, practical, & efficient ways of dealing with the required inputs, storage, outputs, and UX issues. How many coders can even understand and identify race condition failures, let alone solve them? Just "knowing" a coding language only gets you a small part of the way to being a useful coder beyond very basic levels. So, no, "everyone" "learning to code" will not result in everyone having the skills required to work effectively with code, and will not price themselves out of the market. Another aspect is the Indian market with massive training programs, and hordes of Indians with programming certificates and jobs and fluent English language skills. Many companies outsourced there, only to bring the work back onshore because they failed to find the required skill level in India. Yet, I do not hear of programmer pay in India falling. Is this because it isn't falling due to a 'glut' of "people who learned to code", or because I haven't heard about it?
thenerdhead 4y ago
This article reads like the exact type of gatekeeping going on in the "learn to code" movement. > The real valuable advice is not “learn to code,” but “be smart and talented.” Sorry to break it to you, but you can "learn to code" and be quite the opposite and get a six figure job. Coding is a skill. You don't have to be a computer scientist to know that it is a skill that gives you leverage in today's economy.

13 points by bmj 4y ago

This is what happened to lawyers when everyone learned how to read. Then commenced a long evolution of the profession where practitioners did their best to make the law more obscure and to invent as many dirty tricks as possible in order to pull the ladder up and sustain law as a profession through other means of exclusivity than the old education moat.

toss1 4y ago
What a load of absolute nonsense. I have personally coded a system for legal billing, had a variety of direct dealings with the legal system (contracts, etc.), and I live in a household with an attny at a top firm. I've been surprised by a good number of counter-intuitive things in the law, such that the general rule I've heard repeatedly is that we cannot reason about the law without actually looking at the code in that particular instance — go look it up. This strongly resembles software code - we can assume a bunch of things about how something works, but to really find out, we must read the source code or trace it — go look it up. Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. Every single unexpected or counterintuitive thing I've found, once I dig into it, is actually makes sense in terms of history, e.g., this seemingly odd rule of civil procedure is in place to prevent [bad_stuff] from happening which happened before, and from nearly 250 years of law in the US and 450 in some states, some serious cruft has accumulated, and could use some updating. This is NOT to say that some laws aren't unreasonable, and to that we need to look to politics, not some "trickery to maintain legal pay". I should also point out that the legal profession has not artificially limited the supply of lawyers as the medical profession has done by limiting accreditation of professionals. The result is that there are huge numbers of law school graduates, who even pass the bar exam, who literally cannot make a living as lawyers, and being offered $20/hour (literally) to work in some suburban law office with the hiring attny acting like it's a great offer. And watching from up close and inside it, the idea that 'just because you can read means that you should be able to practice law', is utter nonsense. This has NOTHING to do with any kind of alleged "dirty tricks", and EVERYTHING to do with the inherent complexity that arises from the situation. Just because you can write a "Hello World" app in your favorite language does not mean that you can design and build an ACID-compliant accounting system & database, or even know that concurrency issues exist and what to do about them. So, the actual facts on the ground are that attnys have not done the kind of exclusivity and dirty tricks that you cite, and in any case, they haven't managed to keep the wages in their profession high. So just because you have an attitude, does not mean that it is justified. Stop spouting nonsense.
- public_defender 4y ago
  Ugh. It's so discouraging when my lived experience contradicts with the subjective observation of someone who knows a lawyer and therefore becomes nonsense. I do want to point out that the "dirty tricks" methodology is in full effect, but has been wholly ineffective at e.g. keeping lawyer salaries and employability high. Just because it failed to deliver on those axes doesn't mean it's not happening. > Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. I'm not really motivated by this interaction to provide examples, but I assure you they are myriad. What I find particularly interesting about this comment is the assertion that the law makes sense if you just read it. This is both technically correct and practically useless. It illustrates that the intellectual moat which sustained law as a historically elite trade has evaporated. > Just because you can write a "Hello World" app... I hope that the difference between hello world and the other thing is that the developer has skill which adds value to the product. That's frequently not the case with lawyers. A lot of the time the increase in skill doesn't correlate to added value for anyone but the lawyer. It's a profession where people are largely rewarded for selfishly sequestering value rather than creating a better product/service or efficiently collaborating. tldr; I hope that the code boot camps AND the law schools go out of business, but that your field can avoid the needless arcane complexity to which mine has long ago capitulated.
  - toss1 4y ago
    OK, you've been much more deeply in it than I have. I used to have a similar attitude — that I ought to be able to quickly read a law in plain language and know what to do. Yet every time I argued that, I lost to valid often historical explanations from the attnys I was working/living with (& I've lived w/one for decades & been involve in a complex case with lots of BS maneuvering for 7+ years, and worked w/many building software for them). No one doubts that there is a LOT of needless arcane complexity. It is obvious to me that law is a monstrous mountain of arcane cruft. And not only the law, but also the caselaw precedents, regulations, etc.. It's also clear that this 1) has a strong exclusionary effect and 2) that those in the profession have little motivation to reduce this exclusionary effect, and some motivation to retain it, and so don't. But there is a difference between a system that has a tendency towards a result that no one fixes, and a conspiracy to create similar results. So, I'd really like to hear a good example or two that was deliberately created to exclude. Because AFAICT, it's just a mess that nobody is doing anything about and acting like it is some particular person's fault is self-destructive.

andsoitis 4y ago

It’s difficult to tell who the author is addressing and what they want to have happen. Are they talking to aspiring programmers and saying: stay away! Are they talking to government officials and saying: change policy (to what I’m not sure and the author doesn’t describe, yet mentions policy several times). Are they talking to universities/colleges: hey, stop adding courses in programming and advertising them? Etc.

danjoredd 4y ago
I personally interpret it as "stop telling people struggling to learn to code." At least thats how it read to me.

booleandilemma 4y ago

Yes, and FAANG will be able to hire developers the way McDonalds hires fry cooks. That's the end game, but I think we all know this already. Don't devalue yourself.

Dracophoenix 4y ago
Is there something wrong with that? That's how supply and demand works. Also, FAANG aren't the only companies in the world, just like McDonalds isn't the only restaurant.

oifjsidjf 4y ago

It's already hard to get good developers. The only thing this will do will be that searching for good developers will be even harder. The shittiest lawyers work for the government. I have a feeling the same will happen with the shittiest programmers: they will work for the government so now all of the most important government/privacy/identity infrastructure will be done by the least capable programmers.

pelagicAustral 4y ago
I work for government. Hahaha I guess I’m done here for the day.
- cloudymeatballs 4y ago

more_corn 4y ago

Bullshit. There’s infinite useful work to be done. Everything broken, inefficient, unjust is work to be done. Every business idea anyone fails to launch, every improvement anyone fails to implement is money left on the table. I just helped a client launch a tool that captures her decades of specialized knowledge and skill. Now her new hires can do work as well as she does. I charged a lot, but it was worth it because I created even more value. The key here is that even if she could have done it she’d still be creating that value. The reason the computer industry has persisted is that computers are tools for multiplication of effort. Did you ever wonder when businesses would catch on and stop spending so much money on computers? They never did. Because computers create more value than they cost. Excel allows regular people to do difficult businesses projections because it’s a powerful tool. That’s why businesses keep spending money on it. If everyone learns to code we get more work done. Every beneficial software tool gets built. (Ever been at work and thought, man this would be so much faster if “random specialized software tool” existed?) Computers are just tools. Tools help us do work faster, better, with less error. Everyone learning to use powerful tools makes everyone more powerful, multiplies the value of their efforts. But also, not everyone wants to or has the temperament to code. Civilization is specialization.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Bjarne Stroustrup saw this danger years ago, and invented C++ to combat it. The ISO C++ Committee has bravely carried on his vision. https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm > Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers?

danjoredd 4y ago
Unironically trying to learn C++ for that reason. Jobs that require that pay REALLY well compared to like Javascript and Python, at least with what I have seen. Noone wants to use it, but businesses need people that know it, so I want to fulfill that need as best as I can
Dracophoenix 4y ago
In case you haven't realized it, that interview was a spoof. It never happened.

dougmwne 4y ago

To some level, coding talent could be like Jevons Paradox. The price could go down, but the total spend on coding talent could go way up. I see the point about coding being highly scalable, and of course it makes sense that a limited and expensive talent resource has been used on highly scalable business applications. But if coders were much cheaper, it could make sense to apply code to many more, less scalable business problems. While not great for an individual highly paid coder, could be great for productivity growth. Unlike churning out more lawyers, more coders can create a lot of economic value as they increase the overall amount of business automation. I think the policy wonks are less clueless than this author seems to assume.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

toss1 4y ago

Nice argument, and good examples from other professions. The problem is that even if the market is "flooded" with freshly-credentialed grads who can supposedly code, that does not mean that they really can. Knowing the basics of a language is only one step, and not even the most crucial one. Much more critical is the ability to reason about complex systems, abstract the critical elements, and synthesize useful, practical, & efficient ways of dealing with the required inputs, storage, outputs, and UX issues. How many coders can even understand and identify race condition failures, let alone solve them? Just "knowing" a coding language only gets you a small part of the way to being a useful coder beyond very basic levels. So, no, "everyone" "learning to code" will not result in everyone having the skills required to work effectively with code, and will not price themselves out of the market. Another aspect is the Indian market with massive training programs, and hordes of Indians with programming certificates and jobs and fluent English language skills. Many companies outsourced there, only to bring the work back onshore because they failed to find the required skill level in India. Yet, I do not hear of programmer pay in India falling. Is this because it isn't falling due to a 'glut' of "people who learned to code", or because I haven't heard about it?

thenerdhead 4y ago

This article reads like the exact type of gatekeeping going on in the "learn to code" movement. > The real valuable advice is not “learn to code,” but “be smart and talented.” Sorry to break it to you, but you can "learn to code" and be quite the opposite and get a six figure job. Coding is a skill. You don't have to be a computer scientist to know that it is a skill that gives you leverage in today's economy.